Artist interview: Idris Brewster, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Kinfolk Tech
About:
Kinfolk Tech is a nonprofit organisation using immersive technology, public art and community-led design to help displaced and excluded communities tell their own stories. They use augmented reality, collaborative mapping and community-based storytelling to create and augment monuments and public installations that revisit and reimagine the past and envisage, democratise and create radical futures.
Formats: smartphone-based augmented reality (AR), site-specific, expanding into AI and other interactive work
Selected exhibitions and festivals: Tribeca Immersive, Afrotectopia, MoMA, and many more
Organisational evolution:
Kinfolk Tech began in 2017 as a response to the Christopher Columbus monument debate in New York, initially creating paintings that came to life through AR and then moving to creating 3D monuments. Early support came from joining New Inc’s incubator (after a festival introduction), and also via funding through Eyebeam. Later, more significant funding was secured through Verizon’s 5G EdTech Challenge and then the Mellon Foundation. Kinfolk Tech became the first pre-existing app to work with Niantic’s Visual Positioning System, becoming a useful case study for Niantic and enabling easy geo-locative activation of public sites. A New York City-wide exhibition in 2023 led to an invitation from MoMA to be their first AR experience, which in turn led to a range of approaches from museums, cultural institutions, grassroots organisations and others. Beginning as a series of pop-up AR demonstrations, Kinfolk Tech has evolved to a robust nonprofit with a multidisciplinary team.
Distribution and exhibition: challenges and rewards
Kinfolk Tech became effectively its own distribution platform to avoid reliance on big tech companies to provide access to their work. The team prioritises public, community-driven installations over traditional festival circuits. Brewster says they recognise the value of festivals, and are even running their own, but are continually thinking about strategies where immersive programming can connect with other types of work.
Being a unique organisation in their offering of AR community-led histories, Kinfolk tend to be approached by many organisations interested in partnering with them. Brewster says they choose carefully based on work that is closely aligned with their own goals. Even while being in-demand, sustainability can still be difficult given the high cost of immersive technology and the logistics of place-based activations. Brewster says, “That’s also the conundrum of, there’s all these great ideas and things and platforms that we’re building, but what is the sustainability of it as a distribution [strategy]?” He also notes that maintaining attention in between projects can be difficult – simply building work and placing it online is not enough to attract audiences. He says, “We’ve seen the best results when people are at least guided through the experience, because it’s a very intergenerational crowd”. Accessibility is addressed through having iPads available at installations, guides to support engagement and multilingual options, although they find AR can still present barriers for some users.
Brewster observes that the AR technology has not really significantly advanced since they’ve been working in this space, and so they have been continually looking to broaden their activities. WebXR can improve accessibility but Brewster says he finds it lower fidelity and not right for their purposes. They see the AR monuments as ‘tentpole activations’, and are thinking carefully about what might happen in between. One new project is an AI-powered archive of James Baldwin’s works, in partnership with Baldwin’s estate – Brewster characterises it as an ‘ancestral intelligence’. He says,
“[In the] installation you can engage with a typewriter that is imbued with James Baldwin’s wisdom, but it’s really AI, that we’ve curated a dataset around, and you can ask questions, it will respond to you…. what we’re building for Baldwin is this knowledge map of Baldwin’s life, his philosophies on life, who he was as a person, as well as his reading materials, his quotes, and it creates a web of who James Baldwin is from a data perspective, and that’s something that we want to scale up to other historical figures, or communities, or historical information.”
Strategic insights and reflections
Brewster highlights the importance of trust for the community-focused work that they do, and found that this was a gap in the field. “Trust and values is not something that folks were able to find in the distribution space for AR works, or the kinds of works that they were trying to do, and so I think that’s why we started getting traction. People saw us as a dedicated solution for history and culture and underrepresented voices.” When Kinfolk Tech create AR work they do so in concert with local community organisations, sometimes through advisory councils or fellowships, and this goes a long way to setting strong foundations and building trust. The balance between institutionally-based work (such as in galleries and museums) and outdoor public space is also key – they see themselves as primarily public and community focused but recognise the awareness and scale that bigger institutions can offer.